I was gonna ask the same question, but I remembered not all STDIO routines are equal. I've observed weird behaviour while transcoding a file with a pipe command, where neither CPU core was fully used. Turned out it was the lefthand codec (wavpack) that was at fault. Using STDOUT might impair the benchmarks.

Given the relatively small size of the output files, and the amount of RAM people have these days, I suggest using a tmpfs mount instead. 128 MiB would be enough for audio encoding benchmarks. Compression benchmarks are more problematic though.

EDIT: nevermind, I/O redirection seems fine. Redirecting STDOUT to /dev/null would indeed be a good idea.

05-16-2008, 09:04 AM

uncle_fungus

Do you mean encoding to /dev/null or just redirecting stdout/err to /dev/null?

05-16-2008, 09:10 AM

Kano

Look into the gzip benchmark, this one is already updated to use no temp files at all.